If you think you have it tough these days, imagine being a college fund-raiser, charged with getting last years graduating class to give! Well, I’ve been telling you about the power of video in not only creating awareness, but in getting people to take concrete steps in your direction. This month’s case study should make you a believer.
Scott Jahnke, who works in the Development Office at Stanford University, had a problem. Young alumni tune out phone pitches and change addresses frequently. So snail mail and phone calls, the traditional route to fundraising, has become less effective over the years. But 93% of them have a valid email address.
So he made some videos, pretty basic, designed to show the great things that donations were making possible for their peers. And he included a link to a donation page that popped up after the video played. A specific call to action, stimulated by the power of using video as an attractor.
What were the results? Let’s hear what Scott had to say.
“Between 8-15% of alumni who viewed the video clicked on the ‘Donate/Give Now’ button. During the seven weeks of our fall campaign, 51% of the gifts from Young Alumni came in from online – a significant increase over last year. On average, we had 23% more gifts from Young Alumni during the fall of 2008 than we did during the fall of 2007.
By using analytics tools, Scott will be better able to tweak the videos in the future by monitoring where people stop watching, where they decide to give, how many are sharing, and so on.
Lessons learned? Make a good video and always include a simple and concrete call to action. Video is an attractor. It’s the best one there is. But you still need to convert. And as Scott has shown, there’s no need to wait. You can convert on the spot.
To watch the Stanford videos, visit http://youngalumni.stanford.edu. It’s important to see how the video sits in context with the rest of the page. Notice how keywords are placed strategically near the video itself. Google likes this kind of approach to relevance. Hopefully this will convince you to never let a video play by itself on a blank page ever again! 🙂
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Article written by Steven Washer
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